


prompt: amnesia

by alestar



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-11
Updated: 2009-07-11
Packaged: 2017-10-06 06:49:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/50865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alestar/pseuds/alestar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>What we need is a notebook!</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fallout from "Journey's End;" SPOILERS for Season Four of <i>Doctor Who</i>, written for Cliche Bingo 2009.  I think this fic is good if you read it very slowly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	prompt: amnesia

  
_I'm guessing about 30 seconds after the TARDIS took off, they were shagging on the beach at Bad Wolf Bay._  
\-- [messageboard post, 7/12/08](http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=265x5068#5080)

 

Rose takes the man back to the Tyler home, a lovely townhouse in Highgate with gardens in front and back.  She leads him without speaking to the kitchen.  She makes him a bowl of cereal and then leaves him at the kitchen island while she goes upstairs to the rear balcony to stare at the sky.

He finally joins her in new clothes; not the tacky t-shirt pulled across his slight frame, but an over-sized white shirt that belongs to her father, plackets open wide around his neck and collar bones, rolled-up cuffs circling his forearms like bangles. Rose glances behind her as he slides the glass door shut, and she only sees his clothes-- not his familiar face.

She feels sick.

Rose doesn't know if this weird composite human will start to ramble gregariously about the stars above them, or pace and mutter about the science behind spontaneous energy transfer, or if he has changed so much-- if he'll ask her about her _feelings_ and then take her by the shoulder, turn her, press her against the banister and kiss her mouth, follow her back to her bedroom and say again, in the Doctor's voice, that he loves her. She doesn't know what _she_ will do. The waiting to find out makes her queasy.

The person that Rose has become since leaving the Doctor is quiet, wry and almost always armed. An object of intrigue at Torchwood, distanced and inured by her devotion to the lost genius hero. She's not used to feeling nineteen anymore, even though she's hardly older.

Eventually, the new man drops his palms onto the banister and says, "Your mother says I have to get a job."

Rose laughs out loud, surprised. "You're joking. She doesn't have a job."

The man huffs a soft laugh. There's a pause, and he taps out a rhythm with his fingertips before looking over with an odd expression on his face. "It's nice when you laugh," he says. He looks cautious-- and a little confused.

"Oh," says Rose.

The man looks down at his hands on the banister. Rose looks up at the sky. In the last seven months, she's gotten compulsive about counting the stars, watching as they disappeared, one by one. Now the sky looks crowded. Gauche and over-dressed.

"Will you," starts the man, but Rose shakes her head.

The motion-sickness swells up in her stomach, and she says, "I don't know."

 

***

 

There's a house on Church Street that has a rose vine spread out all along its wall, pink roses against blue paint, and when Donna walks by it on the sidewalk, it alarms her.

Donna passes the building every day on her walk around the west end of Chiswick Mall. She could avoid the brush by crossing the street, or she could bypass Church Street entirely for another of the network of flowered suburban streets, but she doesn't: she comes back every day to taste the remnants of some fear, attentive, some old loss or horror.

What is it?

It's something. Despite what everyone in the universe might believe, Donna Noble is not stupid; she knows that the people in her life are keeping something from her.  She doesn't know what happened while she was in a coma, or why no one will tell her. Even her granddad-- her buddy, her partner-in-crime-- watches her with an expression of worry and guilt.

The last few months were seamless for her; she came home exhausted after a long day at work, and then she woke fully-dressed on her bed. She had 32 text messages. It wasn't until the next morning when she started getting ready for work that her mother explained what had happened. She and Lance had gone to Italy on holiday, and there had been an accident. Lance had been killed instantly. Donna had suffered severe trauma to the skull and had been hospitalized in Milan until she stabilized; that's why none of her friends had known.

Donna's father had passed away while she was still in Milan. The HC Clements building had been destroyed, leaving Donna unemployed.

She sank to the floor while her mother told her, leaned back against her heels and pressed a hand to her open mouth. Her grandfather swooped out from nowhere to fold himself around her. They all cried, even her mother, who remained standing across the room.

Later that day, Donna scrubbed a hand through her hair and said, "I suppose I'll go out today and get another job." Her mother snorted. She cleaned obsessively all day, that day, and made Donna pick up her room, even while Donna's grandfather said repeatedly that Donna should rest.

"A real job, maybe," her mother said. She was grinding baking soda into the seams of the kitchen sink. "All these pathetic jobs you've had. You could do-- whatever you want."

"Right," said Donna tiredly. "I suppose I could look for another fiancé instead."

Donna's mother looked over her shoulder at Donna. "I'm tired of all that," she said, mouth curled. She set down her baking soda and washcloth and added, with a pained expression, "You're very special." Presumably she had had some epiphany about motherhood while her daughter was in a coma. Donna rolled her eyes.

"I'm a temp," she said. "No career, no man, no house, remember? The big loser?"

"You're not-- a loser." But Donna could tell from her face-- the narrowed eyes, the tight frown-- that she felt lost saying it. Her mother had perfected the rhetoric of disappointment over the years; despite the change in philosophy, she couldn't bring herself to argue the reverse. She didn't have a way to convince herself it was true.

"Really," said Donna.  "Since when?"

Her mother shook her head and turned back to the sink. "Aren't you a vain one. Lord, I wish I had someone to tell me how special I was all the time. No wonder the men shy away; nobody wants to fawn all over someone every hour of the day and night."

It was familiar, and it made Donna feel better.

Since then, Donna's days have been spent in much the same way. Her mother now fusses at her to be ambitious rather than fussing at her to be realistic, and either way, she's still unemployed. She tries to spend time with her granddad, but he doesn't want to talk to her about any of the things they used to discuss-- the great out-there, the wondrous possibilities-- and he doesn't use his telescope anymore, and he looks at her sadly when he thinks she can't see him.

So she's taken to long walks through London. She walks every day, as far as she can until she gets tired, worried about nothing specific, restless.

_Ambulatory paranoia_, she thinks, out of nowhere.

There is something rolling around the back of her mind. She revisits it every day, like the rose-covered house-- but it frightens her, so she tries to ignore it.

 

***

 

The man's solitary heart pounds as he unbuttons his large shirt on the small planet. He prepares for bed alone in a house in north London.

He doesn't have a name yet. It will probably be John Smith, only without the irony; a real name for a real human. He would like to get a notebook like Professor John Smith's notebook, with its sketches of Rose and the TARDIS and the notes on faintly recollected adventures, but first he'll need to figure out how to ask for one.

He's torn between the requisite humility of being here-- in Rose's home, not knowing what she wants or what he is or what he's going to do-- and the remnant of his identity. He is Rose's ward, more than anything: her human man; her lover, if she wants, and her responsibility, according to the Doctor.  The real Doctor.  Will he rise in the morning and devise with his diminished intellect a way to exchange currency for a notebook, or will he begin by grinning at Rose Tyler over the breakfast table with the conspiratorial mad genius declaration, "What we need is a notebook!"

Either way, he already knows the first thing to record, the first thing to write down. The truth that this man will reach out for obsessively, the unpleasantness on which he will meditate so that it will never catch him off-guard:

_You have forgotten. You are forgetting._


End file.
